Moving on from the MBTI

MBTI has grown from a personality assessment into a moral framework. The MBTI launched into popularity with type descriptions designed to resonate with people, despite its lack of scientific grounding. These descriptions resonate because they describe not just what you are like but who you could be. This indicates that the MBTI prescribes ideals for you to follow in your life, but what if those ideals are misguided?

Just as easily as the MBTI can help you become your best self, it can also subtly manipulate you into becoming your worst self. In some cases it can guide you to read and learn deeply as that is expected if your type. In other cases it might have you thinking you are the most important person on the planet, that you are supposed to be talking - always - talking. If you identify with a strong Introverted type, you may never see the light again as you lock yourself indoors to confirm that you are indeed the identity you have staked your ego on.

In MBTI your type is your crowd. "People like us do things like this" becomes your identity. When your type is INTP, you become the kind of person who reads books, thinks deeply while failing to clean their room or hold a steady job. The system becomes accurate because it changes you.

Not only does the MBTI type change you, it changes entire groups of people. All of the people of a shared type revel in their shared identity by applauding actors who conform to the idea of the type.

In order to prevent tribalism and squishy concerns of moral value, Big Five type descriptions and types have been rejected. This is what makes the big five more bland and uninspiring, but a more reliable psychometric tool.

To top it off the MBTI is just not grounded in reality, it is like a map that is not drawn to scale and has fantastical imaginations within it that have never proven to exist. It is not a usable tool, you cannot interact with someone and determine their type with any rigor (if you can please come and prove me wrong!), and good luck trying to actually determine your own type with any precision. Jung believed that it is incredibly hard to unearth your true self alone because much of it you are not consciously aware of.

I believe the war between the big five and the MBTI has left a big hole behind. Without descriptions and moral values why would you care about the accuracy of the assessment? The big five acts as an excellent backbone for a new moral framework, one that allows (or even encourages) people to change between types, one that allows you to measure traits and make accurate behavioural predictions about other people. The MBTI does this poorly and succeeds while harming people, the potential for the big five to get this right is an untapped lake of potential.

At SelfPsy we added archetypes to the Big Five in order to bring the fun back and make it easier for newcomers to the big five to get involved. We intentionally reinsert moral value into the Big Five, which is okay because typically we are not psychologists writing a journal or making a diagnosis for a patient, we just want to understand ourselves and others, live, grow and learn.